This is going to be a post about voice, I promise. But first, absolutely none of it will make sense without some...
Updates:
Manuscript 1 (Sapphic YA Fantasy): Draft 4, untouched since Oct. 14; beginning line edits next Monday; all queries from Rounds 1-2 (Spring/Summer) have been officially returned as a "no" as of this morning; planning to send to my brilliant professor (my "alpha" reader who turned out to be another beta) again in December to get her blessing that it's the Best Version of Itself before I hurl it into the void for Query Round 3.
Manuscript 2 (Sequel): Draft 1, untouched since on/around August 15, deciding not to touch until I acquire an agent/publishing deal because why double work when I know Book 1 will undergo further changes? Based on Draft 4 (and my own self-awareness while writing), I have a running list of things I know will change regardless, but that's all I've done.
And my exciting new project, which I shall henceforth term "Manuscript 3" (Sapphic dystopian romance): Approximately 8,500 words, so, like a literal BABY in the grand scheme of my word counts, which usually hover around 100,000+. Despite completing Manuscript 1 in a month (July) and Manuscript 2 in a month and one week (July again), I highly doubt I'll even be able to "win" NaNoWriMo (50,000 words). If you're reading this, you know me. You know November is historically my struggle bus month, and this November may be the struggliest of them all. I will be happy if I get 25,000 words written by December 1st.
But I'm not here to make apologies. I'm here to talk about Voice, with a capital V, because it is literally one of the most crucial parts of writing, well...anything. Although I mentioned last week that I kind of glossed over the Moulite sisters' discussion of voice, my brain choosing to latch onto the publication/agent/querying advice instead, something clearly did hit home. Because, although my gut instinct was to think "I'm secure in Aiselde's voice," the truth is that I wasn't always, and writing this new manuscript has me thinking A LOT about that very point.
You know I started Manuscript 1 six years ago, and that I abandoned it several times, which my later self has attributed to having literally no plot and a generally aimless vibe. But that is not the whole truth. The plot was an issue, but so was the actual writing of it.
So, in what is part-guide and part-story, I'm going to explain exactly how I came to be so secure in Voice--and what you can do if you're struggling with yours. With that in mind, here are my four considerations for crafting a voice.
Know your place and time
Pick your POV poison
Step into your main character's headspace (and that of the other main characters as well)
Revise, revise, revise
Voice Consideration 1: Place and Time
I've said again and again that I did things backwards in my first manuscript. I had a character. I had her for literal years and placed her in various different fan fictions. When it came time to write an actual manuscript, I took said character and then attempted to spin a whole backstory as to how she became the character I've held onto for years. And so there comes the first of many massive problems.
You see, in trying to craft a suitable place that would shape the likes of Aiselde Dinsmore, I could never actually pin down an era. That's mainly because it takes place in the realm of myth, not any place you could quantify in terms of space and time. But suffice it to say if you could, I would say it takes place somewhere around 900 CE. Not too old that books don't exist, but sufficiently old enough to be well-entrenched in the lore of gods and magic.
I instinctively knew in choosing this setting that Ais would have a more archaic voice, but it couldn't be unreadable. When I was 17, I thought this meant large amounts of purple prose and descriptions of literally every single thing. I borrowed my language from Game of Thrones. I avoided the use of contractions. I also wrote in first-person present--as I still do--which had the lovely effect of forcing me to sit with my character's voice for the entire writing experience.
But the voice I'd given to Ais in this first attempt didn't feel right to me. Writing in this voice wasn't enjoyable. It felt quite a bit like being forced to wear someone else's pants. In parts, I felt too constrained. In others, I felt like my authorial underwear was at risk of showing literally every second, and how embarrassing it is to have my own voice be visible underneath my character's. But the overall effect was just to feel so plainly self-conscious that I felt I couldn't move forward.
To continue the pants metaphor, having no alternative but to wear these borrowed pants, I chose to go completely pants-less. I would not write for several more years, at which time I learned something.
I may have been given these ill-fitting pants, but that didn't mean I couldn't tailor them.
I'd just finished Circe at the time, and was in awe of the way that Madeline Miller had crafted a language that sounded perfectly ancient and modern at the same time. I studied her turn of phrase. I decided to let a few contractions slip into my writing and to also cut most of the purple prose. Through reading Circe, re-reading the His Fair Assassin trilogy (set in 1300s France), and skimming my beloved Dostoevsky (not that ancient, but he's great at characterization, okay?), I decided I'd need to invent some swear words. I'd need to let frustration slip in. I'd need, in short, to make Ais a person.
Voice Consideration 2: Pick your POV Poison
Admittedly, this one was easy for me. My trilogy is the story of Ais. I also happen to prefer reading stories set in first-person. I absolutely abhor the dread "had had" that comes with relating events set in the distant past in a past-tense story, and in an epic fantasy centering around generational trauma, I knew my first chapters would be full of this if I didn't go with present-tense. Plain and simple.
Except...is it?
By the time I got to my second or third draft, I was having issues. There are several key points where Ais splits up from other characters and important things happen to those other characters, and I was getting tired of forcing this important information to be relayed in the much-less-exciting "and then this happened" format. In both Game of Thrones and the Courting Darkness duology (a spin-off of His Fair Assassin featuring my fave, Sybella), multiple POVs work to tremendous advantage. In GoT, these are all in third-person past, while in Courting Darkness, 2/3 are in first-person present, while one is in third-person past.
And so I began to wonder if I might do that. I wrote a chapter in Ais's twin brother Emrys's point of view, and then another in Ais's love interest Saoirse's point of view, since those two were the most likely to become POV characters. And while these chapters taught me a lot about each character (and parts of both were incorporated in later drafts), I ultimately realized something: if I just make Ais present at these events, there is no multi-POV needed. I didn't need to widen my pool of POVs--hell, my story had enough going on even without that--but I needed to change my location. Geographically speaking, these characters aren't scattered far away. A few hours' walk will place them in the same spot as each other.
That's not to say I'm against multiple POVs, but only when necessary, and in this case, it proved that an under-edited story and underutilized characters were the real culprit here.
Voice Consideration 3: Step into your Main Character's Headspace
This is the big one.
When I was reading The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, admittedly after Draft 4 had been written, I learned that Stuart Turton wrote scenes in each character's life to get into their headspace. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it, but I also don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll just tell you this: 7 1/2 Deaths features one character who inhabits the bodies of eight others. As such, he begins to take on the mannerisms of these eight others. It's a fascinating study in character, and I intend to do this exact practice when writing/editing Manuscript 3.
But I also did a variation of it, seemingly on my own, when coming up with Ais and then when editing Saoirse and Emrys.
I want you, right now, to go wherever it is you go to find writing inspiration. For me and one of my beloved friends, we go to The Plottery on Instagram and look at their monthly writing posts, which feature suggestions for each day. You could use that one. I've had a co-teacher who used Reddit. You could even write some fanfiction one-shots, but with your character as the OC (as my sweet, cringy 14 year old self did with Ais). It truly does not matter to me.
But what I want you to do is to take your character out of their environment and their comfort zone and to find out what makes them tick. How would they react while on a tour of ancient castles? Or getting ready in the morning? Or driving a friend to the doctor's office? These might sound truly, terribly mundane, but I have placed Ais in every single one of these scenarios. I've even taken personality tests as each character. (interestingly, I've made Ais an extrovert, though how I've written as an extrovert for 200,000+ combined words across the trilogy and yet taken on none of these qualities myself is truly a mystery).
My point is that to know how your character operates is to know when they're out of character and to know when a line of dialogue you've written, OR if it's in first-person a whole paragraph of monologue, sounds remarkably out of character. It's how I knew that Ais would never read a book willingly, so she'd never make the kind of detailed magical observations, grounded in theory, that her brother would. It's how I knew that she wouldn't fight Saoirse because she wanted to fight, but because the alternative would mean using her magic in a fit of rage, and there's nothing worse to Ais than losing control. It's also how I knew that I, the author, made some truly stupid decisions in early drafts.
And finally...
Voice Consideration 4: Revise, Revise, Revise
I talk about voice like it's something that sprung up after the first-draft, barring a few hiccups, but it didn't.
Revision is discovery. If you write in first-person, it's basically like introspection, and it only comes about because the more you are stuck in what is basically a locked room with your protagonist, the more you begin to know them. Each revision brings Ais clearer and clearer into focus, and, as such, her voice emerges semi-organically. On this fourth draft, I began to see how her voice in the beginning is laden with shame: she wants to hide, she constantly apologizes, and she's a prickly person because she's afraid.
But slowly, through spending time with the resistance and discovering that there is yet good in her, she becomes braver. She stops obsessively checking her runes--and, as such, her monologue becomes less full of mentions of them, so they slowly fade from the reader's mind as well.
Remember: what your main character focuses on is as important as the language they use throughout, and that becomes most clear with time.
Now, that was a long one! I have code trees for grad school to go cry over :)
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